This is one of those strange subjects, in which I seem to be out of touch with, if not in opposition to most of the right. It’s also somewhere I think that Musk is not just wrong but also d*mn wrong.
As in I read the whole about how most (98%) government workers don’t bother coming into work and was mildly shocked, then realized they meant most of them work from home, and headdesked so hard my desk is going to need repairs.
Not coming into the office is not the same as not working. In fact, it can be the absolute opposite.
Sure, I mistrust everything the government does, because in the long run government has a track record of doing only two things well: Hurting their own people; killing their own people.
But let’s talk about telework itself outside of the context of government (with the understanding at least some people in government are doing good work, and doing it well. And some of them are undoubtedly teleworking.)
Telework has one major problem: it’s hard to manage. I.e. Managers need to have along-the-way goals and verification that it’s being done. They can’t just look over and verify that x is doing what he’s supposed to. (TBF they never could, but that’s something else.) On that, it becomes worse if you’re managing a group from another culture, particularly one that has internalized that all questions from above are to be deflected to save your life. (China, for instance.)
The management problem is partly one of all work: People don’t have the same basic social bend across the board. Some people are extroverts, some introverts, though there’s a gradient in both cases, and some introverts — raises hand — actually need to see people every day, particularly people they don’t live with. So given a choice — not here — I work in places like coffee shops. I don’t want to interact with people — beyond ordering and paying — because that’s stressful, but I need to see people to, as I put it “know there are people outside my head.” In the same way, I suppose there are some extroverts who are only extroverts under precise and isolated circumstances.
For whatever reason (having to do with how personalities express) managers tend to be extroverts. Extroverts want to manage people where they can see them. Meanwhile, in tech and frankly a lot of the creative professions, people tend to be introverts. And work better without people continuously poking their nose into what they’re doing.
So, working at an office is not without management problems: it’s just what we’re used to because tech used to demand it. And because we’re used to it, we think of it as “normal” and “normal” gets taught in business schools. That’s it.
And that “normal” is really only of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and even then I’m not absolutely sure. Sure, we all have the image of Christmas Carol and Cratchit working in an unheated office, but I’m not sure how universal the “works at the office” is nor how blurred office and home were.
To explain: in Three Musketeers Porthos goes to get money from his mistress who is an accountant’s? solicitor’s? (it’s been a minute, and I haven’t had nearly enough coffee) wife. He’s invited to dinner with his mistress, her husband and her husband’s apprentices. Who lived in the house, and got treated as extended family members. In fact, a lot of the employment through the 19th century — and probably the late 19th century — blurred the line between “where you live” and “where you work” and though I can’t think of any office work being done that way in literature of the time, I wouldn’t be surprised if clerks worked from home, copying contracts, or correcting writing.
I know non-office work, things we’d think of as factory work was done at home more often than not. Sure, piece work, with people sewing stuff, but also not rarely, there were looms in the house, either owned by the family or by someone else, who contracted the family to operate it. The job might be shared by wife and daughters and even, sometimes, husbands. I only came across it for textiles, but I know other such things must have been done. From personal witness in the village, when I was a kid, every woman had a work table in a back room, where they put in time working for a contractor. The work when I was little was making boxes. Okay, this is hard to explain: most “higher grade/higher cost” products like cosmetics or tonic pills or such, came in little proprietary, often beautiful decorated card boxes. I don’t know why in mid twentieth century Portugal these weren’t made in factories, but they weren’t. They were made by housewives in their spare time, for pennies a piece. The more talented painted the scenes/lettering on the top for a little more money. Did it pay amazingly? I doubt it. But it was something they could do while the kids napped, while the food cooked, etc. And it gave them a little money, something that was just theirs, for gifts, for tiny indulgences “something in the stocking foot.”
I understand there was more of that type of work earlier, and more women did it. (And frankly, knowing how much more work housework was, my hate is off to those women. What I did, getting up at 5 am to write is nothing to it.)
It was only with the advent of mass production and the concentration of non clerical work in factories that the idea of “you go to central location distinct from home to do work” became “normal”. So late nineteenth or early twentieth century, depending on location. (And yes, I realize some work couldn’t be done at home. You’d be surprised how little that mattered. Sure, the farmer worked in the fields, but the sharpening and repairing of tools, the looking after livestock, etc. was all done at home.)
For that matter, the forbidding of work at home piece-work was mostly to appease unions. And sure, the unions said they were stopping exploitation. And maybe they even thought that was true. I mean, sure there were probably instances of people being exploited, but how much of it was true and how much was a few dramatized cases, and the unions taking the opportunity to expand their power? Consider that these same institutions demanded that people working at home taking care of family members for no pay join the service workers union. Also, sure, I’m sure the piece-price for the little boxes by the women in the village sucked on ice. It had to be low enough that getting a machine to do it wasn’t worth it. On the other hand…
On the other hand it was work those women COULD do. While minding the children and watching the pot. While cultivating the yard that amounted to a little farm. While caring for the sick and helping the neighbors.
When that work went away, the choice was to let everything go and go to work on the factory floor, or to lose the extra income. I disapprove very strongly of interfering with contracts between workers and those who need the work done.
Which brings us back around to work from home now, as telework, for “office workers” and white and pink collar occupations.
I’m prejudiced on this. Dan and I wanted to work from home long before it was feasible. Him, because he’s an introvert and likes his silence and ability to concentrate. Me, because if I tried to do multilingual translation, which was the idea at the time, I’d have had to move to NYC because it’s the only place enough jobs existed. But also because we like being together most of the day.
So that’s my prejudice. But the truth is that Dan and I were working from home (me full time, obviously) and he three days a week since about 2012. So we got to see the advantages (disadvantages too, as we tend to forget to stop working, but that was always a thing, anyway.) From that perspective, until 2020 we were baffled by the resistance to telework from most companies. It seems to me the ability for most office workers to work from home has been there for… 15 years maybe 20.
And the advantages from a company perspective are obvious:
Have access to the best workers, regardless of where they are.
No need to have offices in large/expensive cities.
Save money on utilities, desks, all the other accoutrements of an office which is no longer needed. You can have minimal meeting room for visiting dignitaries if that’s a thing, but that’s it.
For workers:
Sure, you’ll use utilities at home, but you don’t use gas.
Depending on your company, this means you might not need work clothes.
You won’t need a car that you commute in every day.
You gain about an hour aggregate that you’re not driving to work (and sometimes more) and back.
You can eat at home, homecooked if you wish, which is cheaper and healthier.
More importantly, you can do other things: put dishes in the dishwasher. Pop clothes in the washer. Keep an eye on the baby. Go outside and weed the tomatoes for ten minutes.
It is particularly good for women who wish to raise their own kids.
But won’t doing all these things mean shoddy work?
No. Distractions always exist. At some point in the 90s someone did a study in which they established that people in offices only did productive work for one to two hours. Because humans are humans. I used to go with Dan to his office (we really don’t like being apart) about two days a week (the kids were in school, and this allowed me to be near Dan. And write. But mostly be near Dan) and that’s what I observed in the land of cubes. People chatted, and got coffee, and someone came over to ask about goals, and then talked for an hour, and then it was lunch time, and– (Dan mostly didn’t take part in this, because we’re both a little broken. We just like working side by side…)
It’s just at home the work that’s being done is work that is arguably better for society. Or at least I believe that women are happier and raise saner kids when they are raising their own kids. Working from home is the only way that I can see “almost every woman working” being good for society. Also, in that sense, it’s a restoration of an older way of life. That’s how people used to live until very recently in sociological terms. And though it’s not as easy as it sounds, I can even envision marriages of the future being made with an eye towards job-sharing. If you’re both programmers in the same specialty, I can see sharing one job and having time for other things/sharing the other gig work/child raising too. (Not as easy: There are as many types of programmers/engineers/etc as there are of writers and note that Dan and I have never collaborated, I collaborate only in shorts with older son, and … well, yes, I’m writing novels with younger son. And we’ll finish it when my body gets a little less proactive about trying to kill me.)
And heck, the environmentalists ought to LOVE love love telework with an unclean love. Think how much less pollution it causes when people aren’t driving around. It also allows people to disperse, so as to minimize environmental damage to any one area.
On the other hand, of course, most environmental activism is designed to make people uncomfortable, not to stop polluting the Earth so they probably won’t like it. Heck, part of the reason the crazy gas prices hurt less these last few years is that fewer people were driving.
The biggest problem — BIGGEST — with telework is managers who don’t know how to manage remote workers. And while that is a problem, yes there are management techniques for remote work, including checking productivity at various intermediate points.
Unless your productivity is impossible to check, as in, it’s make work, this shouldn’t be a problem and it’s a matter of adaptation.
In my opinion right now the biggest opposition to telework is from companies that have invested fortunes into centralized, showy offices, and who see their “investment” losing all value if telework becomes the “normal.” This is supported by raging extrovert managers who are being denied their supply and really should find another hobby.
Will some people work best in centralized offices? Maybe. Professions dominated by extroverts such as sales seem to get energy from each other and bounce off each other as part of their process. No one is stopping them. But there’s no reason to apply that to everyone, including people who are more productive in isolation.
How many people can even work from home is …. unclear. Obviously those who must work with materials and machinery belonging to their employee and which can’t be removed to the home, truck drivers and other transportation workers, hospital workers and obviously farmers and mechanics cannot work from home.
But even there, I would hold a tic, as we see other innovations come to bear. Tele medicine is a thing for instance. And before you scream it’s not the same as an office visit, let me tell you as someone with a wonky body, office visits these days aren’t much like office visits in the past, and the chances of things being missed are about the same. And it’s possible that fabricating machines will be possible to have in the home in the near future, working for a contracting entity who collects the product, in a return to the old ways. (Yes, some of it is already possible with 3d printing and being done entrepreneurially.)
The one thing I can tell you is that in the end telework will win, regardless of the raging of the companies trying to avoid the commercial real-estate/large city crash. It will win because as my friend Charlie Martin said about ebooks versus paper books: ultimately the method of delivering product/service that’s less costly and more efficient always wins. It’s not what one wants. It’s what it is.
How long it takes, how many distortions in the way, it all depends on how strenuously our government and “managerial elite” oppose it.
Faster might be less painful, like ripping off a bandaid.
Meanwhile, of the many many reasons to be upset at government worker waste? Telework isn’t one of them. Even if their work is largely make-work and therefore can’t be verified, at least by doing it from home (or not doing it from home, more like) they are wasting less taxpayer money for utilities and accommodations.
According To Hoyt 
In general, I agree with you.
But Musk’s complaint (as I understand it) is more about government workers that don’t do what they are paid to do.
How many of these “work at home” government workers are actually doing anything?
Obviously I don’t know but if we’re going to get government spending “under control”, it is something that should be looked into.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Forgot to clink the box.
LikeLike
It might be what he means, but it wasn’t what he said, and it’s not what various departments are already doing in response to the announcement.
Which is mostly, going off of the folks I’ve spoken to, hitting the disabled veterans that work gov’t desk jobs. You might hurt too much to drive for an hour and hobble up the stairs, but you can sit and work. Only now you can’t do that more than one or two days a week.
LikeLiked by 1 person
As one of those government workers whose telework could end up on the chopping block, I’m perhaps one of the few that isn’t going to jump up and down screaming about the potential for DOGE recommending death to telework, for a few reasons.
First, I like what I do, I like the organization we support and the people in the org, so even if the mandate from on high comes back as “back to the days of one telework day per week, MAX,” I’ll keep chugging along.
Second, honestly, I think the ones that likely WILL be hit with a no to little telework policy will be the workers in that wretched hive of scum and villainy known as Washington, DC. Which brings me to…
Third, anyone screaming about DOGE / Trump admin potentially cutting back on telework has conveniently forgotten or is ignoring the fact that the CURRENT Biden admin has already begin pushing RTO because of (or in part because of) all the downtown DC businesses that have lost mountains of income from the DC crowd not being in the office. Thinking about it as I write this, I wouldn’t be surprised if the recent Biden agreement with the SSA union to keep their telework levels as they are through 2029 might not be so the Ds can point to it in the 2028 as a “See? See? Vote Democrat to keep your telework, the evil Republicans want to take it away from you!” issue.
Are there people in my org, on the team I’m on who might be abusing telework? Absolutely. People are people. Is our team more or less productive while teleworking? I’d say in general, our productivity is higher, partly because we can use our personal PCs to get answers to technical issues (we’re an IT team supporting servers for other orgs that have their apps on our systems) without having to fight the security lockdowns on the work network, and partly because, while I love the team we share office space with (the desktop support team,) well, they got used to having the office to themselves from 2020 to about last year and they kinda don’t have volume controls.
It’s gonna be a wild four years in gov, I think, considering DOGE has basically said they’re not even going to have their first recommendations until July 2026.
LikeLike
Wow, that long? The mind boggles. I thought DOGE was slated to complete their recommendations by 7/26.
I’m a retired Federal employee and my work expectations did not change when teleworking started. I had projects with deadlines that I had to meet. Now, whether the work was something govt should have been doing is a totally different question
LikeLike
Tech workers, and other people whose job does not require much interaction with others, should be able to keep working remotely – with, perhaps, a weekly or periodic appearance at the office. That connection with other workers, staff, and the bosses needs to be maintained, lest the workers lose sight of the Bigger Picture – the overall goals of the organization.
LikeLike
I don’t disagree with you, the occasional “oh, yeah, THAT’S what you look like” days aren’t a bad thing. It’s real easy to get disconnected from your co-workers working remotely, to do all your communications over email, Teams / Discord / whatever chat apps, or the occasional phone / voice call.
As of right now, my work has everyone coming in 2 days a week, and in April the plan is to go to “50% of your total work days per pay period.” So the M-F folks (pay period is 2 weeks) will have to be in-office 5 days a pay period split between the 2 weeks, the people on 5-4-9 compressed schedules (4 days @ 9hrs a day each week, and 1 day every other week for 8hrs) will be coming in (I think) 4 days a pay period, and us maniacs working 4x10s will still only be coming in two days a week.
LikeLike
I keep saying that I would HAPPILY volunteer to have my job “cut” (it won’t happen, I’m too low on the totem pole, and anyway our office is *hellishly* understaffed), and I’d be happy with even just six months of severance. That would be enough time to finish learning stenography and get qualified (hard to do right now, on account of having to commute an hour each way to the office five days a week…)
LikeLike
Being IT, I don’t see my job being on a chopping block anytime soon, as long as I can keep my motivation up to stay at least a bit behind the bleeding edge.
And, well, honestly, being in IT and my age? Yeah, it could be VERY tough to find another position, there is a distinct whiff of ageism in IT…
LikeLike
Yeah, that’s why I figure if I don’t retire from this job (and maybe even if I do), I’ll do something that’s always in demand and age doesn’t matter (ie, court reporting or captioning). :D
Presuming I don’t develop, you know, horrible arthritis in my hands or something.
LikeLike
Maybe, maybe not. Musk also made a big deal about getting the workers at his own companies back into the office. So his push toward government workers fits an already existing pattern.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Work from home seems like a Gen X thing. Not to say that it’s exclusively Gen X. But Gen X is the one renowned for being the one that gets prickly about micro-managing, and most in favor of “tell me what you want done, and then leave me alone while I do it”.
My current employer sent nearly everyone hime during the shutdown. Then they told people to start spending time in the office. First it was one day a week. Then a few months ago they switched to twice a week (days picked by the department). I have to come in every day (my work can’t be done remotely) so it’s no real change for me. But everyone else needs to start coming in more.
Except…
There were several buildings on the campus I work on, but one has been sold. So possible space issue? Also, I know for a fact that there are a lot of employees that work much too far away to commute into the office. Why is it okay for some people to work remotely, but not others?
LikeLike
Musk’s opposition to telework predates his involvement with Trump. He’s been opposed for some time.
He’s also wrong. And Sarah’s “it’s hard to manage” objection isn’t really accurate. What is hard, and what’s behind management opposition to it in my experience, is to justify the amount of management corporations typically have when people are teleworking. It’s easy to make the case for the Pointy-Haired Boss types when you can walk through the cubicle farm and see “all those people” they “manage.” It’s less easy to justify once you figure out that the people actually doing the work not only manage to get it done without him breathing down their necks, but they manage to get more of it done faster. I say this as someone who’s been involved in telework since the mid 90s.
My problem with Musk’s campaign to end government telework is that it’s all smoke and mirrors, simply replacing one kind of inefficiency with another. It’s one thing to argue that government workers are slacking off when they work from home, but it’s another to say that somehow part of the magical fix for government overspending and inefficiency is to force them to commute to an office. That’s simply not true, and no one should fall for it. Musk may be able to thin the herd by forcing people back to the office, but the statistics show that the people who are coming back aren’t the best and brightest, because those people know they can jump over to private-sector jobs that let them telework, if that’s important to them. And forcing people to spend multiple hours per day driving or riding mass transit really doesn’t make them more efficient, even if you can coerce them into doing it off-the-clock.
LikeLike
I agree with you. The problem Elon addressed at Twitter was the enormous number of people who were doing NOTHING towards their stated job, instead spending the day on “office collaboration” apps (MS Teams, Slack, etc.) that devolved into Bitch Sessions among the Woke, calculated ways to keep their ideological opponents from utilizing Tweets, and other non-work activities.
No, their jobs, as THEY performed them, did not add to the bottom line of the business.
The majority of the government jobs (particularly in the upper levels of management) do not add any value to either the ACTUAL functions of government – those that are the stated goals of the department/agency, nor to the True Rulers of America – the Citizens.
LikeLike
Musk doesn’t allow WFH in general.
He doesn’t understand working from home because he lives from work.
LikeLiked by 1 person
the second half of Musk’s comment was that 63% of those working from home are also working a side job during government work hours. That means over half of the workers are obviously not doing what they are being paid for
exile1981
LikeLike
Yes. That’s fine.
LikeLike
I mean firing those is fine.
LikeLike
I have heard that Musk has qualified it to “gov workers who telework and don’t actually work.” (Don’t know if it’s true, but it would make sense.) My father, who works in the same BLM field office as me, has been teleworking nearly full time since 2020. He’s doing the work of three petroleum engineers, and covering multiple field offices, so he certainly isn’t an issue. On the flip side, we both knew other amongst our coworkers who didn’t do a damn thing during the COVID stupidity when we all were forced to telework, so it’s certainly something that needs looked at.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My stepdad was doing a similarish thing during the covidiocy. But what drove him crazy about working from home is that at work he had a HUGE desk with zillions of monitors, OK maybe just four huge monitors which meant he could see his schematics properly. His house was too small for a big enough computer lash up. Water under the bridge now, bless his heart he has passed away. But he was grateful to get back to his big screens.
LikeLike
The people claiming lack of productivity from remote work and it’s impracticability not for a specific field but in general need to sit down, get a glass of water, and start explaining the existence of the primary software stack which runs the world.
I’ll be generous; you only need to explain the Linux kernel to start with, not the entirety of open source. But that is the limit of undeserved generosity.
Start talking.
LikeLike
That was supposed to be a top level comment, not a response.
WPDE.
LikeLike
You first.
Although you might want to ask Sarah before highjacking her blog.
LikeLike
I’m not making claims about the world which would make open source impossible. The anti-WFHers are.
LikeLike
I have to disagree on this one, but it’s probably because I’m feeling somewhat paranoid, especially when it comes to government telework.
I think it comes from folks who absolutely do not want any records of what they are doing.
The #1 defense against Stupid Government Tricks is that one guy that says “can I get that in writing, sir?”
For a company, it is also a holy water humidifiers in the middle of a crucifix shop for those vampires who eternally pass the buck.
“What? I didn’t tell you to do that. You must have misunderstood. We agreed that [something totally different].”
They do still try this when there are email chains, by the way. It just doesn’t work as well.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, they still do it; that’s what Slack / Zoom / Teams are for. Yes, there was a meeting, but unless everyone agrees to the meeting being recorded, details disappear.
LikeLike
For government, that would be proof of an illegal action.
I’m much less worried about jerks in buisness, though I celebrate making things harder for the jerks and mostly point it out for why there’s opposition.
LikeLike
Not for LA County, apparently. YMMV.
LikeLike
Why on earth would I be fixating on a known corrupt hellhole– to the tune of “multiple known gangs involved in their police department, for half a century now”– in a known corrupt state when the subject is federal employees working from home?
I’d love to save California, someday. It’s far in the future, sadly.
LikeLike
I’ve been in a LOT of meetings throughout all my decades in Silicon Valley cubeland, and a lot since at the current gig after I exited the Tech rollercoaster, all of those latter remote.
Plenty of the in-person meetings were, lets say, under documented, leading to much noise and conflict, desperate pleadings to the next level managers, then decisions form on high accompanied by stern warnings from on high that meeting minutes were mandatory with all action items documented within x hours of the meeting.
Some meetings worked great. Some were as above. Some were gladiatorial games held to have managers fight it out, blood in the sand and all that, and whoever got approval from the VP throne at the end of the table at the end “won”.
Remote meetings that I had, often across lots of time zones (last position in cubeland was managing a product line where we had dev teams in Ireland and they eventually had their own sub-teams in the subcontinent), were slightly more productive and better documented.
In my work-totally-from-home gig since 2014, both internal and with clients, it seems to me as though there has been more caution across all participants about making sure things-agreed-to get documented and tracked. Maybe that’s because we mostly employ people who have experience in the wilds beforehand, so they’ve all been burned by “I did not say I would do that thing” conflicts. Maybe it’s because we’re generally remote-meeting with lawyers.
So with all that said, my theory on why the commercial world, especially Tech, is so heck-bent on getting people back into those cubes is as a result of that Tech rollercoaster I mentioned driven by second- and higher-level managers. They have their little empires, and their projects and priorities, and I think they are worried that, at the next round of inevitable layoffs, they will get penalized if they don’t have their masses of minions swarming the cafeterias on a regular basis to show that their little empire is oh so busy on stuff.
The typical Tech layoff basically cuts resources without cutting any projects, so the survivors get jammed trying to finish everything with nobody to do all the work. The second+ level managers have been around long enough to know how the game is played to keep more of yours than the other guy, and part of that is being seen to be busy, as well as actually delivering projects and such.
If the VPs and EVPs can’t see ‘em, the managers think theirs will be first up against the wall with the layoffs come.
I think that is wrong, for most of the reasons Sarah points out, but I think it’s those middle manager folks who are driving the higher and C-suite folks to issue these rules.
It’s not fully just control or bad MBA-school management techniques*, I think it’s preventive positioning for the next layoffs.
.
* Back when I managed people, rather than as at the end just products where other teams people did the work, I was a huge proponent of “management by walking around” theory of people management. Sure I had meetings too, but I always got more insights, found out about more problems and roadblocks my people were hitting with other groups, was able to walk over and work those out directly with said other groups, and generally had a much finer view into what was going on by wandering hither and yon and just seeing what was up.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Which is almost impossible to do when everybody is on telework…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Managing a distributed team of reports is hard.
I had one really good remote manager in all my cubeland years, several less good, and one actively bad. The really good one made sure communication was established and didn’t get skipped, was responsive to pings, and fronted the group to the next level, with congrats passed down and problems blocked as his own to answer for (he turned around and asked us, but he took the heat). The worst one went dark randomly for multiple days, ignored anything her reports passed up that we needed help with, un-darking only with issues that were problems for her, took on tasks outside of ourgroup’s actual remit for which we didn’t have any resources, and deflected any and everything non-congratulatory that she received from higher down onto her reports.
LikeLike
You may have hit on the most important part of it. If people work remotely, their texts/chats/emails are ON RECORD, and discoverable.
LikeLiked by 1 person
E-mails, possibly. Our corporate Slack chat is set to auto delete after two weeks, so unless you make a special effort to copy off the info, it’s gone.
Conference calls are under another set of rules.
LikeLiked by 1 person
they are also on record when you do that on location at work.
LikeLike
The VPN I connect through shows a map image with my neighborhood highlighted. Remote work is manageable and trackable. Trackable to what measurement is the real question, and that applies no matter where my butt is parked. Technology doesn’t solve that issue.
LikeLike
> map image with my neighborhood <
Smiles. Because <strike>Hughes</strike>Dishnet has the ground terminal in the DFW area, anything that tries to throw up local adverts or store locations gets that. It’s a mild pain, but other than having to decline the “share your location?” offer, it’s tolerable.
I don’t know if Starlink has the same problem. I keep considering it, but we’re locked into Dish for TV for another year and a half. Not sure what the TV + Internet combo gets me for a discount; Dish is remarkably opaque about detailed pricing.
LikeLike
Starlink does have the same “problem”. As does our private-service cellphone/tablet hotspots.
It’s freakin’ AWESOME to have three or four different states as your detected location…and none of them are Iowa.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s cute to get restaurant recommendations for a place I haven’t been through since 1967, but I appreciate the effort.
Dishnet is quite consistent; if there’s a ground station other than DFW, my signal never goes through it.
I don’t use the smartphone barring the rare need, and the flip phone is supposed to be silent for GPS tracking unless going to 911 services. Whether TPTB honor that is an open question. OTOH, it’s off unless I’m in Flyover Falls or traveling to Medford. I haven’t been east of the Mississippi in over 7 years, nor in Mordor-on-the-Potomac since ever. That should cut down the number of lists I’m on by a tiny bit. Fed the Fred has most of my thoughts copied, anyway.
LikeLike
.
Only been in “Mordor-on-the-Potomac” twice (4x’s if you count the round trip), for 4 days each. Both trips for National Jamboree early 2000s. Not my fault the travel agent couldn’t get me on a flight home before Tuesday because of all the troops flying out Saturday – Monday … Looks innocent. First trip I did everything I could squeeze in figuring only time I’d ever be there. Second trip, re saw parts of a couple of museums, and the (then) new Native museum. It was HOT in 2005.
LikeLike
LOL. I take great comfort in the fact that my computer thinks I live in lower Colorado and my phone thinks I live in Chicago.
LikeLike
they are also on record when you do that on location at work.
LikeLike
In person chit-chat isn’t on record. Granted others in the water cooler discussion can rat you out. But unless recorded, how do they prove it?
If working at home, that isn’t happening … unless using personal tools to connect (i.e. land lines, cell phones, etc.)
Again, no oar in this working environment anymore, but having a record of whatever is not a bad thing. “Hey, I pointed this out in email on X date, it was received on X date, it was read on Y date (or never).” … Additional CMA may be forthcoming. In person just adds “You never said anything.” Wrong. More likely they didn’t pay attention. But unless followed discussion with a written email (guilty of), no proof.
LikeLike
Heh. It’s a defense IN government against stupid gov tricks. “If it wasn’t documented, it didn’t happen, therefore DOCUMENT ALL OF IT so our butts are covered”
(usually, it’s because we’re finding something somebody decided thirty years ago, and didn’t bother to document the whys and the who’s…)
LikeLike
I had SO MANY orders vanish when I asked for documentation of the order.
It’s amazing!
LikeLike
Heh. We know our department is a rarity not only in our field office, but in the bureau in general, in that we work really hard to make sure our files are tidy, our records are as up to date as possible, and that we know where most of the casefiles (for land rights-of-way, not actualy, you know, *cases*) are at any given time. We’ve tried to train others in our methods, but mostly they look at us like we’ve got lobsters coming out our ears, and continue on with whatever insane troll logic they’re using instead…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Telework is a giant can of worms, and we are never going to get the worms all back in the can. The Social Security decision recently highlit that well. It makes little sense to force ranks of headset-wearing computer-using call center people into a single office with commuting and office space rental when they can sit at home on the headset and type *with* the right protection for data and communications. (my son did similar home-based headset/typing work for a credit card company for several years, and they were quite good at the security end) And of course the reverse is true in some circumstances where physical presence is needed. When done well, it works well. When done poorly….no.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think part of it is the difference in output between how one is paid for hourly work vs piecework.
With piece work, your work output is measurable in the number of pieces you complete. You are paid for the physical objects you produce and (hopefully) the materials you used to produce them, not the time you spent working on them.
With hourly work, you are paid for the number of hours you spend working, regardless of how much you produce or what your task is. (And yes, if you consistently don’t get your tasks done in the hours you work your will lose the job, but that’s… a secondary measurement.) I don’t know how it is in any other industry, but an hourly office worker will either slow their tasks to fill the time allotted, or will finish their tasks quickly and spend the rest of their hours … doing some thing that resembles work but isn’t.
Salaried work… you are paid a set amount and you do the job. If the job takes longer you don’t get paid more for the extra time you spend.
So it’s easy to measure output when one is doing piecework, which makes it easy to do in a distributed way.
With office work… it’s harder to measure the outputs, unless you have a program that shows you how many reports or application or whatever an individual worker has completed. (And you can just about guarantee that any such program would be programmed so stupidly that it wouldn’t properly reflect worker’s outputs or the effort needed to achieve those outputs.)
Therefore the “Boss looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re actually doing work”… for what little good that does.
If I had to guess, though, forcing “work at central office” on federal employees is less about making sure their work is getting done, and more about punishing them for working for the federal government.
LikeLike
Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill available time.
The bane of procrastinators and students everywhere.
LikeLike
As one who celebrated his 30th anniversary with his employer yesterday, I can say that at the end of this month I will also be celebrating 29 years of telework. It can happen and people can get productive work done. I have more than likely been more productive over the last 29 years working at home than I was in the year I worked in the office with people bothering me every ten minutes for something that likely wasn’t even in my wheelhouse.
And I didn’t lose my job in 2020 because of the main office closing due to even more strict lockdown rules than the ones my city imposed. I didn’t need a letter that said I was an essential employee or whatever the term was in order to go to work, like my wife did. I just walked from bedroom to office and went to work.
It’s insane to think telework doesn’t work, though I’m sure there are people who would take advantage of it, figuring nobody would ever find out. But it’s like Sarah says, it gives someone who is otherwise diligent some extra time to throw in a load of laundry, pet the cat, have a coffee, do the dishes, or whatever. In the end there seem to be more hours in the day because there’s no physical commute, no time wasted with work prep before you leave, etc. Saves on gas, saves on clothes, saves on eating out because it’s too much trouble to prepare lunch.
And companies that are able to let their people telework really should do so. The tools for that have been improved and honed through adversity during the plandemic. They work pretty well. And telework has the potential to save companies millions of dollars on office space they no longer need.
But I’ll shut up now, I’ve taken my coffee break and need to get back to work. ;-)
LikeLike
“though I can’t think of any office work being done that way in literature of the time, I wouldn’t be surprised if clerks worked from home, copying contracts, or correcting writing.”
I would. Clerical work tends to involve secrets – information that the people paying for the work don’t want to become public knowledge. Protecting secrets is a lot easier if all the physical records of them are kept in a single place that can be carefully guarded.
Now if you’d said that the people who kept records usually lived where they worked – that was very likely true. Copying documents doesn’t require heavy equipment or going to distant fields, so there was no reason to separate the workers’ residence from their working place. But clerks picking up original documents, copying them at home as piecework, and bringing them in when finished – no, that never happened.
LikeLike
Government work at home as a Census Field Representative: Involves confidential information, work from home, have distant supervisors, you never see. Census has done it for decades.
Some interesting twists, no paid holiday. Only paid for the work you do. Data collection has competition, unlike most government work. Sworn for life to keep all information confidential. Census one of few agencies required by our constitution.
Perfect retirement job for extroverts. They pay you to meet interesting strangers, get out of the house and exercise. You work from home. You set your own hours, and your boss is 300 miles away.
LikeLike
I’d point out that, while census work involves confidential information, it’s not information which, if revealed, would hurt the boss’ business, which is what I believe Michael was referring to. If confidential census information is leaked or otherwise revealed, it might get the individual worker either fired or, in some cases, even jailed, but the boss wouldn’t be held liable unless the boss was actively involved in the leak. At least, I’d hope not; the “Vertical Stroke” policy employed by the former Soviet military sounds good, but in reality meant problems simply didn’t get reported “up the chain”.
LikeLike
The irony is that if confidential census information leaks, it has a large impact on the “business”. A major promise made to census participants is that information is and will be kept confidential.
If no one trusts the census to keep their information secret, participation drops. The organization suffers from loss of trust. So the agency has a vital interest in keeping information confidential. Their yearly confidentiality training points this out as a vital reason to keep information secure. So leaks strike at the heart of the reason for the organization, and why it must work very hard to be trustworthy.
This is why the FBI’s loss of trust is so dangerous. Who will watch the watchers? Civilization is trust.
LikeLike
OK, got it. And FWIW I agree. I didn’t consider that leaks would hurt the organization, even though the specific leaked information doesn’t.
LikeLike
Remember that a bureaucracy prioritizes at all time the bureaucracy itself above all else, so damaging the Frog Bureau would be a higher threat than damaging almost anything else to a Frog Bureau Bureaucrat.
LikeLike
And what good is having a fiefdom if you don’t get to see your serfs?
But seriously, anything collaborative is best done in person.
Personal bonds largely established and maintained by actual in-person contact are different than those formed at a distance. There’s a lot good to be said about tight-knit teams. (Although MBAs seem to actively want to destroy them.
There’s certainly a place for telework. But it’s far from a panacea. As with everything else, there are trade-offs. And Chesterton’s fence is in effect.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I wonder if slacker .gov managers might prefer remote-only employees. Certainly the ways I learned to manage people took a lot of work, so if an unfireable GS manager wanted to coast, doing so with all remote reports might be easiest.
LikeLike
In my normal work (conventions and such), I get to meet all sorts of people.
Last year, I was talking to a mid-rank government official, and he was ranting about telework. It turned out that a majority of workers in some government departments stopped answering their mail while “teleworking” at home during COVID, and never even got reprimanded for it.
I like working from home. I get things done much faster, and can use my own computers (which are quite a bit faster and better-equipped than the ones my employers use). It pissed me off that someone could be collecting a government check when there’s literally no output and no accountability.
LikeLiked by 1 person
For security, we’re required to use either our company laptop or one provided by the customer, and the software we’re allowed is controlled. In addition, we’re pushing “virtual desktops” where our company laptops are moved back to “dumb terminals”.
LikeLike
Years and years ago, I worked for a very large publisher of scientific journals. I was a copy editor, one of their job classifications; they also had proofreaders, production coordinators (who handled scheduling and put together issues of journals), and a couple of other categories. And there was an incident where an author wanted to do A rather than B in their journal article, which was contrary to journal style. The production coordinator saw the request, and went to the copy editor, and the copy editor said, “I think it would be better if you did B.” And the production coordinator did A, and when asked about it, said, “They didn’t tell me to do B.”
Well, yes, they had. But the copy editor was an introvert, as copy editors generally were, and the production coordinator was an extrovert, as production coordinators and other administrators commonly were. And the copy editor told them to do B in language appropriate to an introvert, which the extroverted production coordinator didn’t understand; they need to be told “Do B!” and not “I think it would be better to do B.”
*****
On a different note, one of the things that struck me in reading Harry Turtledove’s (now) pentalogy about merchant seafarers in the Hellenistic era is the scenes where a character visits a brothel, and the girl he favors puts down her spindle and distaff to go into another room with him—because all of them are earning a little extra money by spinning thread, rather than sitting idle. On one hand they may be slaves and the money may go to their owner, but on the other hand it’s probably less dull than sitting idle, and on the third hand a sensible owner would give them a small bonus for turning out thread, to keep them motivated. And no doubt the same is true of Greek housewives, but the viewpoint characters aren’t going to see other men’s wives!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reminds me of the scene in ‘The Cross-Time Engineer’ where Conrad has just finished building his loom and announces, “Now I just need 2,000 five-hundred-yard spools of thread to string the loom.”
He was horrified by the girls’ distaffs. “That’s how you make thread? No wonder cloth costs a fortune! Weaving is the least of your problems!”
So the loom project gets put on hold while he designs and builds 6-station spinning wheels. The girls rejected his first attempt, with them laid out in a row. No, no, the wheels have to be arranged in a circle, facing inward, so they can gossip while they spin.
LikeLike
Yes. I’ve read that the simple spinning wheel multiplied the rate of thread production by five; allowing for unchanged time for weaving, that roughly tripled the production of cloth, I think.
There’s a painting by Velazquez that shows two women spinning, one with a spindle and distaff and one with a wheel; it’s commonly interpreted as a portrayal of the contest between Arachne and Athena. I gave a print of it last year to a friend who’s a textile arts geek in a big way. It’s a neat bit of technological documentation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Carding took the most time, followed by spinning. Weaving was “fast” (on a horizontal loom) by comparison, once the loom was warped and the shuttles loaded with weft thread.
LikeLike
I have timed myself, spinning. I spun for years with a drop spindle because I couldn’t afford a wheel; my first spindle was a crochet hook pushed through a bar of soap, around 1990. I finally got a wheel in 2010.
Said wheel is modern-manufacture Ashford, some time around 1980. It’s single-drive, flyer, Scotch tension (for those of you who know what that is). I can spin LITERALLY ten times as fast on the wheel than on the spindle. Or ten times as much, however you want to phrase it.
I was quite methodical about it–I took the same fleece, prepared the same way, and spun for an hour. Then I measured the singles. The wheel-spun yarn was ten times the length. Now, for those interested, the actual SPINNING is faster on the spindle. It’s the winding-on process that really slows things down, and with a wheel you just relax your grip a little and whoosh, the flyer winds it on for you. With the drop spindle you have to stop, change your grip, unhook the yarn, twist the spindle and wind the yarn on, and then rehook the yarn and change back for spinning.
LikeLiked by 1 person
How many yards per hour with the spinning wheel? I’ve seen spinning wheels at Ren Faires, and estimated that they were spinning about 2 yards per minute, or 120 yards per hour.
Based on that, I estimated that it would take about 40 hours of spinning and weaving to make the cloth for a basic denim work shirt, making the labor cost over $700 in today’s economy.
In Conrad’s case, six girls with spinning wheels could spin the thread to string his loom in about 3 months. With distaffs, it would take more like 3 years.
LikeLike
I’m not that fast, around ninety-five to a hundred yards an hour with the wheel. (And this varies TREMENDOUSLY depending on what yarn you’re doing–thin, high-twist triple ply will be a fraction of that, and warp yarn HAS to be high-twist.)
The old equation is that it takes six to ten spinners to keep a weaver supplied with yarn. It certainly gives you a perspective on the old Icelandic laws where damaging someone’s garments was punishable by exile. (A simple shirt costing months of labor. Yes, I can see exile.)
LikeLike
I have a Lendrum, have never really timed myself because it’s largely a, “Watch Jeopardy/Forged in Fire/whatever,” activity.
But I have a, “God Bless the Industrial Revolution,” spiel I use at demos.
LikeLike
Thank you for providing a solid number. I’m glad I wasn’t too far off. I expect you’d get faster if you spun all day every day as a job, instead of occasionally as a hobby.
Spinning is not unskilled labor. You can’t sit some rando in front of a spinning wheel and expect to get good quality thread out of them. It will be lumpy and weak.
As for Dorothy’s ‘God bless the Industrial Revolution’, that’s what the Luddites were opposed to — the greatly increased productivity brought about by the Spinning Jenny and powered looms.
LikeLike
When they first invented the spinning wheel, you could still got higher quality thread from the spindle.
Also a spindle is easier to transport, so a woman who intends to spin while walking to and from her mother’s, and at her mother’s, needs a spindle for that.
LikeLike
I’ve seen Forbes videos on Youtube where certain senators and/or representatives are harping on various FedGov Dep’t heads about how their employees are teleworking and need to come to the office and i very much disagree with these people. If their work is getting done and their work goals are being met, i’m fine with them not going to an office in DC. I’d prefer that they didn’t need an office in DC, didn’t live anywhere near DC, and they can live in whatever little liberal statist hellhole they’d prefer as it would clean up politics in my state considerably.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“If their work is getting done.”
Ah, I see your problem here.
It’s not. At least, not by a preponderance of workers.
LikeLike
if people aren’t completing their work, then yeah, they should be gone.
if their work is being completed, i don’t care where they are.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I want the HQs moved out of DC. Farm stuff to North Dakota, BLM to a stretch of BLM land in Utah, DoD to Pentagon II located in the exact center of the DoD Federal lands in Nevada, Foggy Bottom to Texas other than Austin, Immigration to Austin, and Department of Energy and EPA to the North Slope in Alaska.
Actually FBI and CIA can go to the North Slope too. Make it a little fun city of bureaucrats up there.
And once HQs are out of the swamp I’d allow telework for everyone but the top, oh, lets say four layers of management, who have to work in their HQ in person every day.
LikeLike
Great idea!
LikeLike
If the peons are working at home, there’s a lot less opportunity for Empire Building in Middle Management. There’s less need for Middle Management, period.
Naturally, Middle Managers fight tooth and nail against work-at-home.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My employer is forcing me, in fact, our entire 1500-person technology department, back into the office three days a week starting next month even though I’ve been quite nicely working from home since March 2020. Why?
Because “collaboration.” Seriously. That’s their reason. Because we’re supposed to Collaborate with our cow-orkers.
Never mind that I can do that via Teams or Webex chats or calls. Never mind that I will start losing two hours a day to my commute on those days. Never mind that our office area is already overloaded BEFORE our area goes back in. Never mind that I will have to book a cubicle every single day I go back in and I will never be in the same place twice (so how can I “collaborate” when I might be in this building one day and that building the next and on different floors constantly?).
Nope. I will now drive 100 miles a day 3 days a week, lose 2+ hours in the commute, and have increased expenses in food and gas and wear and tear and clothing and everything else, because of Collaboration. When I have my VoIP setup, two monitors, and everything else I need set up quite nicely here at home.
It’s stupid. It’s just freaking stupid.
LikeLiked by 2 people
We’re still being ruled by 19th-century control freaks.
LikeLiked by 1 person
So you have three days a week to be a City Tourist who clocks in and out and goes to lunch, and two days a week to get work done.
Yes, I know, we can’t do things that way. It would drive me nuts, too.
But if they want you to “collaborate,” obviously you’re all supposed to just stroll around socializing, right?
LikeLike
…………
I’d be documenting how much I wasn’t getting done because I was in person in the office. eMailing daily, with read receipt. I’m diabolical that way.
My last job work productivity didn’t matter, home VS not. Because we didn’t collaborate. Not at all. None. Zip. No teams. Although I will admit to having overheard a discussion on how something was to proceed and stuck my nose where it wasn’t asked to be. Wasn’t listened to (the old “you do realize that …” type “suggestion”). I was right. Wasn’t the actual work being done, it was certain presumptions that were being made that affected how it had to work. (Hm. Neither cell nor satellite coverage were going to work for coordinating data back and forth. If it would, the VPN method would work.)
That job went to home work in 2020 (years after I retired) and will never (never say never? I’ve lost my info source.) go back into the office. At least two people are over 100 miles away, one over snowy mountains. One moved (before company sold) with permission. The other hired as remote. The office was moved and sized down to just servers and a couple of offices for the two who did not want to commute. This is programming that isn’t done on your home computer but done on the office servers via VPN.
How many people were hired as remote workers that are now being forced into the office? Personally, I’d be more than angry. Breach of contract. Guess PTB are counting on bad enough economy that people can’t afford to give notice.
LikeLike
The sad thing about us being forced back into the office is that our whole part of the company (remember, 1500+ people and that’s just onshore, not counting our offshore contractors in India which are several hundred more) is actually spread across THREE offices. One where I work in the South, one in California, and one in Texas. Most of my team is local. My boss is in Cali, as is his boss. The department head is in Texas. The users we support are both here and Cali. I guess we keep collaborating over the phone or Teams then.
Oh, and they’re bringing us back in despite having just laid off 2% of the company and furloughed most contractors for three weeks unpaid in an effort to control spiraling expenses. The company’s doing great (financial sector) but sorry, here’s layoffs and your raises next year won’t keep up with inflation again.
I hate being told “oh, you should come into the office, senior VP xxx is here today and should see you.” Why? Judge me on the body of my work, not the fact that my fat ass decided to grab some clothes, cosplay The Human Wrinkle, and drive 50 miles to sit in a random cubicle and get less work done because I don’t have my comfortable setup and have to eat 2+ hours on the road. I guess that’s why I haven’t gotten promoted in eleven years at this job while other people have shot past me, and why I’m still a drone while pushing sixty. (Well, that and Old White Male Syndrome while everyone around me is Indian, but that’s a rant for another topic.)
Oh, and we do have a lot of genuine remote workers not anywhere near any of our three offices, almost all hired since the coof. The company has repeatedly reassured them that they will not be affected. No one is believing it for a second since upper management, especially on the tech side where I am, is absolutely hellbent on getting us back on the cubicle plantation.
LikeLike
I’ve been working from home since May of 2020. I also no longer have an assigned cubicle and there’s no room in our bullpen for me to have one. I know that corporate is really starting to push for RTO, but my supervisor is fighting tooth and nail to leave me exactly where I am because he’s terrified that I’ll quit rather than comply with an RTO requirement. I’m 3 weeks from my 30th anniversary. In my local office, my “peer” with the next highest tenure has less than 2 years. We’re a highly technical field and I get multiple calls daily from the other guys on the team. They won’t be totally lost when I leave because we do have a Technical Assistance Center, but they normally take a few hours to days to respond. I answer my phone darn near every time someone calls.
I have three computers and connect to multiple customer systems remotely. My network speed screams compared to what they have at the office. I couldn’t be anywhere near as productive if I was sitting in an office somewhere.
LikeLike
…. Why is my husband calling himself RadioSub now?
On the serious side, I wonder how many of you are in this position right now.
LikeLike
Considering that you seem to have a high proportion of active and semi-active posters here who (a) are older and more experienced (b) in the tech sector and (c) live away from the centers of big urban areas…I’d say a LOT.
LikeLike
I am in the same boat with you. How am I collaborating when I am behind a steering wheel, exactly? And to avoid rush hour traffic, my hours are skewed so that I come in or leave when co-workers are not even in the office!. Meanwhile, my manager is in a different office 1,000 miles away. “ Collaboration” is code for “I don’t trust you”, despite years of loyal service and awards. The result is that I am simply less productive and more of a flight risk for the company. I guess they are ok with that, which is a red flag that they do not value my service as much as I perceive they should. Given the expectation of AI efficiency making some labor redundant, maybe this is a strategy to incentivize employees to resign, in other words, a slow, methodical and inconspicuous clearing of perceived “dead wood” that is not duly conformist and homogeneous to the latest edict from the executive suite. The employer pays no severance, avoids a lawsuit and, if necessary, hires cheaper and younger replacements.
LikeLike
Set up tag-team “Hey boss!” with your coworkers. Ask endlessly. Walk-ups as often as possible.
(grin)
LikeLike
Our family has been on both sides of telework. DH began telework in 1998. But he had to spend 3 days a week in the main office every month, a 3-hr drive from our home. His mom lived in that city and put him up on those weeks in exchange for repair labor in the evenings. Eventually DH got sick of that monthly travel and we moved to that city. A few years later, we moved to another state for an employer change and back to the office. Years passed, until the day I told him we had to move back to take care of my now-widowed parent. The employer of that time period was reluctant and dragged their feet for 2 years until they worked out the telework situation and we could move again. When 2020 hit, nothing about work changed for us. Thanks be to God, we became the rock that supported both our adult children who lost their small company (child #2) and place in grad school (child #1) because of the insanity. Now, everyone DH works with is doing telework. His manager is located in England; his most frequent project partner lives in Poland. He feels he is working with the best team he has ever experienced. And there are no blowhards shouting across the cubicle walls all day long or playing hacky-sack in the break room. And the cat comes in for lap time every day.
As you pointed out, the key is managing to specific objectives, measurable objectives. I would wonder how many government managers could comprehend such concepts.
LikeLike
Specific and measurable objectives?
In most government work?
Art thou licking toads?
LikeLike
I have both teleworked and managed teleworkers, and I vastly prefer the former. Editing is a natural work-from-home job, and my pre-COVID employer had been permitting proven, reliable employees to do so two or three days a week, for years. The biggest problem in supervising them was making sure they worked the required hours — and no more. Because they were paid hourly, state law required us to pay overtime if they worked more than 40 hours a week. But because our industry was transitioning to a piecework mindset, each editor had a weekly quota to meet. So those who were slow workers would put in extra hours “off the clock” on their home days to meet their quota. I had a heck of a time getting my boss to understand that this was a problem and could get us in real trouble with state/federal labor law. (And a harder time getting IT to dig up the database login records so I could prove it.) Maybe many teleworking employees are goofing off at home, but there are just as many supervisors who are happy to have those “invisible” unpaid hours worked at home by introverts who just… can’t… stop until this thing is finished.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Especially when it allows them to lowball their project estimates and then make it clear that those who don’t work the time needed to “meet” them aren’t performing.
LikeLike
Ran into that, constantly on reviews. I was salary. Lord help you if you weren’t putting in 60 hours a week and didn’t hit the targeted marketing deadline. Not the engineering deadline, the marketing, which was very much full of BS. Not the top reason I got cut during the bankruptcy stave off round where all departments, even understaffed engineering, had to cut 20%, but it sure didn’t help (even had two coworkers offer to take my place, all that did was make the manager’s decrease numbers look better).
LikeLike
My husband ROUTINELY forgets to keep track of extra hours.
LikeLike
As much as I hated the dang thing, the auto VPN login time tracker was nice when it was working. The program worked, it just didn’t always auto log the start time. Had to remember to trigger it (which I forgot to do). Then had to login, and manually adjust start time, which the (then) boss did not like. Suppose to login start, and after lunch. Logout for lunch and end of day. Just tracked what hours working. Like none of us put in < 8 hours a day (except, his son, naturally).
That was one of my post retirement nightmares. After all boss bargained for on call work on a per hour basis. (Not that I got called, but …) Nightmare goes did work hours and hours, but forgot to login to this program so “no proof of hours”, just production. That is when I wake up. Never called (well once, within a week, and I went into the office, never got on a machine, but still).
Thank goodness we were salary, no OT. Also good we didn’t track hours for work for clients. I am lousy at it. Was very good at getting so focused that all of a sudden “OMG it is well after 5 PM”, or work through lunch (although that generally was because on the phone with a client, but not always).
LikeLike
I know why I didn’t get called.
I refused to do “project” work. Insisted on actual hours worked. Boss kept insisting I could make more money with fixed hours on projects, just do the projects faster. Um. No. I’d worked with those clients for 12 years. I had 30+ years working with end users. Nope. Nope. Nope. Not a chance in hell. When project “done”, there would be a tweak here, another tweak there, on and on and on and on. With hours, just charge the company again. I bill lawyer hours.
LikeLike
Same. I got coddled working in “per job” world. It was predictable and practical: you got paid for what you did. Not how many hours you stood around picking your nose. Not how much time you spent on social media. Not farting around and generally being a semi-benign oxygen thief.
If you screwed up, that was hours lost. Pay was still the same for the job. If you had to go back and fix what you broke, you didn’t get paid for that either. Only successful jobs paid money.
That meant that the slackers and the idiots went away. There was no reason to work 22 hours a day making less per hour than peons in Vietnam working slave wages in a textile plant. That left the competent people.
When that company got traded and went to hourly wages, completion rates plummeted. There were more and more complaints about job quality. More failures, more things getting inefficient, less customer satisfaction. The competent people left. The oxygen thieves were back in.
I work now in a very competitive space. Turnover rate is high, but the longer serving workers are top notch. When the boss wants to make money, he cuts hours. The work stays the same, you just get less time to do it. This drops efficiency, end-product quality, and risks fines for safety and process violations, but it is the single simplest way to cut costs.
For that reason, most managers love it. Planning for efficiency, promoting quality and customer satisfaction, smoothing out the jags in process and logistics/supply chain? That stuff is hard. It takes work. Effort. But cutting hours? Easy peasy.
With telework, it is harder to control your workforce and cut hours (not impossible by any stretch, just a bit more difficult sometimes).
So, I tend to forget to log those “extra” hours. My brain says “start, go through the middle, stop when you get to the end.” If the end is two hours past shift end, oh well. Job got done.
My feedback reports tend to reflect this. “Good work ethic. Always on time. Excellent work quality. Poor time management.” But I always get the job done. So they tend to keep me around.
LikeLike
If I were in charge of efficiency in a failing company, I would do exactly what he’s doing.
I saw a discussion with Elon a while back, and he didn’t say they would submit their recommendations by 2026, he said their work will be done by then and DOGE will be shut down. Trump has given them until July 4, 2026 to be finished.
LikeLike
As I understand it, as many as 50% of off-site gov’t workers never log in to work.
One would think that the ones that never log in could just be summarily fired.
LikeLike
It’s just barely possible that they are doing paper projects, or projects that are so secret that they have to be delivered by hand.
But yeah, that doesn’t sound too likely.
LikeLike
You would, wouldn’t you?
Except we’re talking about US government employees.
Firings are very, very hard to do.
LikeLike
It can be done, but it does take effort. Or you can put all the barnacles in a cube farm with no phones or computers and see how long it takes them to die of boredom. For managers, you give them a section loaded with the most neurotic, OCD people you can find. I actually saw this done to my section chief after he “forgot,” to do our performance appraisals. He became a section chief for a one-man section with the one man being a guy who could drive a saint to drink. He retired in six months.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Re becoming deceased at a desk, this has actually happened. There was one recently in a commercial world cubical environment where they thought she was just always sleeping at her desk. I have heard from a .gov friend the story of a .gov employee where the deceased was in a closed office – there were complaints about a smell in the HVAC system, but coworkers failed to notice that the person was pining for the fjords for a very long time indeed.
LikeLike
It’s what I understand NYFC Schools do with teachers that, can’t be fired due to unions, but no one wants in a classroom with children.
They report to a building and sit around all day reading, playing with their phones etc., all at full salary.
LikeLike
It’s hard to do because you have to properly file the paperwork.
Which most folks don’t do.
Not doing work is, actually, a thing that can be documented– “must log in to network during work hours” is an acceptable requirement, and you can document it if they falsely file time cards for work not done.
LikeLike
I’ve been poking around to find anything that’s even close, and can’t.
I could see it applying to people who are issued laptops and phones for hotspots never using them, because they are out doing inspections and such which is what makes them offsite workers, so they physically go in and connect to that network– or even deliver physical copies, which is also an option.
Play telephone a few times, and the “we need better tech support so that our guys can actually USE these tools” turns into “half of them never log in to do work at all.”
LikeLike
Back in the late 80’s early 90’s the small independent government agency I worked for was pushing both car pooling and telework. Car pools never really caught on and the initial enthusiasm for telework, mostly by mothers and fathers with small children faded rather quickly once the agency made it clear that one of the conditions was that those with kids were required to show proof of either nanny/babysitter or daycare. Visions of getting full pay while eliminating child care expenses went away rather quickly.
Was also my experience that all those interminable meetings with 10 to 30 attendees were an absolute time waster but made more palatable for moi once devices for e-books became readily available. As a long time console jockey multitasking came fairly easily and I was able to almost keep up with my reading.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“…required to show proof of either nanny/babysitter or daycare.”
It’s a ridiculous requirement if the work gets done, and shows the boss has zero trust in the employees, so how about “My spouse [girlfriend, boyfriend] also works at home, and babysits the kids here.”😉
LikeLike
As PJ O’Rourke noted about most federal employees, output can’t be measured, so input has to be. (Shrug) It’s the nature of this beast.
LikeLike
The type of out put that causes the boss to announce they are “paying bonuses for all bugs found and fixed?” Anyone ever read the phrase “I’m going to go write me a new mini-van!”? (Dilbert™️)
https://devhumor.com/content/uploads/images/October2015/paid-debugging-animation.gif
LikeLike
Yep. It’s control freak bs.
LikeLike
I’ve called in to call in centers and on multiple occasions heard kids in the background. Aha I say to myself, a teleworker. And neither of us is harmed by it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Call centers are a somewhat special case, but as long as the work gets done, any requirement to not have children present is ridiculous. As Sarah noted, it’s all control freak BS. (“I can make you do it, so PHBBBBBTTT!”)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Actually, they can’t make you do anything; they can only fire you for telling them where to stick their stupid rules. :-P
“That’s where it came from, just shove it back in!”
LikeLike
Granted; my comment was about what they think they can do. And I suspect that if it got to a rational, honest court, they’d find that they couldn’t legally do nearly as much as they think.
LikeLike
What I meant to say was is that it wasn’t a center actually it was a home and the centee was teleworking. My bad. And this includes a couple scholastic advisors for my online college.
LikeLike
OK. I sort of assumed that was the case, since telework from home is the subject of the thread, and quite a few call “centers” seem to work that way. But thanks for confirming.
LikeLike
Oh, so glad to see you. And yes, yes. Very odd book soon.
LikeLike
As opposed to your usual boring vanilla conventional works. Can’t wait to see.
Had another turn recently, but am well enough that would not mind the odd job or two hunting down the wiley printed bobbles.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Reader grants that there are a large number of workers who could telework. The interdisciplinary hardware design he spent his career doing is not among them. The Reader can’t imagine developing a complex sensor without being able to get all the key team members in a room multiple times a week to work trades. The supporting analysis can be but the actual ‘rat killing’ needs to be done in person.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The consultant gig with the German client worked that way. We did the hardware & software for their equipment on the US side, while the Bavarian engineers made sure the code matched their specs and that the goodies we did would keep working once it was turned over.
We did video conferencing every week or more, and face to face 4 times.
Unfortunately, the company crashed and burned just before we released. Combination of Y2K/Dot Com bubble slowdown and Edifice Complex. Shiny new building for more business. Didn’t happen. Shrugs.
LikeLike
Where and whether telework does or does not work is not something that can be deduced from Basic Principles by Smart Experts being Smart. Instead it’s something that has to be discovered by messy market experimentation.
Which creates an obvious problem when it comes to determining where and whether telework does or does not work for various government jobs.
(Okay, there are cases where you can point to physical Things that cannot or should not be taken home for work-at-home. But in cases where either home or office work is possible and the argument is over which is “better”…)
LikeLike
In my (admittedly outdated) experience managers are one of the principal bars to innovation, the people who want to do everything exactly as they’ve “always” done it. Nowadays, people who are used to managing employees in the office are unhappy about learning to manage remote workers. Back in the days of the dinosaurs… well, I once worked for a software company that got acquired by a chip manufacturing company. Some VIPs from the parent company visited us and eventually asked, “How can you tell if these people are doing any work? They’re all just staring at the wall.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yep.
LikeLike
I did some work-at-home when I was consulting in 2001 & ’02. The customer we were consulting for was based in Germany with a sales/support/training office in San Jose. I was doing the coding and debugging, but when the target machine was not available, much of the coding could be done on my home computers. (Not a huge program, but involved. I’d get blocks working at the office, and could use & modify those blocks for other parts of the program.)
About 2 days a week could be done from home.
LikeLike
My job (Desktop Support) isn’t something that can be done from home for the most part, though there are things I can do remotely like install software and check a computer’s function remotely. I’ve even brought laptops home to re-image/setup since I had an appointment and working from home was easier.
Help desk work can be done from home if you have a good connection though it depends on how the desk works.
LikeLike
Did software support, all over the phone, my entire software career ’85 – ’16. Supporting people on software I was writing. Except ’90 – ’96, only met one or two people I was supporting, that was because we stopped in when hubby and I were on vacation near the county they worked at. Granted software phone support has gotten a whole lot easier since the invention of remote connection/view the other desktop software and internet connections. (No. Not that icon/button, your other upper left corner that has the word “print” on it. Sigh.)
LikeLike
The whole telework/in-person/hybrid work thing is a massive ball of snakes that has so many different issues.
How many of these “issues” are ones where landlords, building owners, business owners are being told by their local munipality that if they don’t get butts in chairs (who have to commute and pay for public transit/parking/gas, buy lunch/dinner/drinks, maybe some light shopping, etc, etc, etc) that are going to generate them some tax money…there may be some painful assessments on them instead of painless assessments on their employees?
Or people that have strived for Middle Managment because that was the perfect spot for the sociopath to have a career in white collar businesses? If they can’t be there, showing how well they’re driving the slaves…er, managing their staff…and properly boot-licking Senior Managment…what’s the point to them?
(I had a glorious five years in middle management where my job required me to not hover over people’s shoulders because I could only be in one place at one time. My job was to make sure they could do their job as quickly and completely as possible. Anything else was wasting time when we had narrow windows to succeed at.)
How many people have discovered that they do so little work at their current job that they could take two, three other jobs and as long as they kept them separate, they were making more money and didn’t have to drive an hour each way to spend eight hours in an open office plan with crappy coffee and Lisa in the space next to you that has only two volumes, Loud and LOUD? And let’s not even talk about Max, who is on a keto diet and seems to sweat pure garlic.
I don’t think telework is a panacea and I think there should be enough “in person” time that you know that the person isn’t three kobolds in a trench coat, but the technology is at the point or nearing it where a lot of jobs don’t need people in offices most of the time. Government jobs…for the most part, I can see them being required to be there, but still.
LikeLike
I think it comes down to 1) is the work actually getting done, and 2) what quality is the completed work? If the answer to #1 is “less than before, or none at all,” then telework is not working [pun intended]. If 1 is positive but #2 is “lousy/barely coherent/has to be redone by the next worker” then telework is not working. This might be individual, or environmental (home internet unreliable, for example).
My personal experience with “telework,” trying to teach through the ‘net, was miserable. The students didn’t learn as much, and my ability to teach was hampered. I also realize that teaching via computer is very different from true telework, but I’m biased against telework unless it can be proven to be better than other options.
LikeLiked by 1 person
teaching is something else.
LikeLike
Maybe not – I’ve taught in person, but there is a significant percentage of any class that could learn better outside of in-person contact. Those would generally be the introverts.
Extroverts HAVE to have interpersonal connections – without it, they wither. My husband is one such, and his efforts at online grad school have been failures. He just needs the contact with other people.
I don’t MIND the contact (much), but operate without others just fine.
LikeLike
I’ve taken a few college classes online, and loved them.
Especially the ones that offered transcripts instead of a video or, worse, live lecture.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My husband and I have taken online courses with limited interactions over a semester. He is a BIG extrovert, I’m a solid introvert, with some willingness to interact within one-to-one and small groups.
When we took the same class, my husband managed fairly well. We would work together on assignments, and he coped with the limitation on sociability.
When we took separate classes, it was fine for me – I didn’t need the presence of another human, and I was fine with limiting my interactions to occasional online meetings, and mostly asynchronous chat.
For him, however, it was a disaster. He would constantly hound me to ‘help’ him. Really, now that I think about it, he didn’t need help, he needed another body to talk to. Remote online grad classes were torture for him – he never did finish his master’s degree, because of the lack of interpersonal stimulation.
LikeLike
I’ve been working from home since Covid started.
Actually increased team productivity since we all lost the soul sucking commute to the islands of urban madness and aren’t speeding 3 hours a day in traffic or the horrid mass transit system containing human waste and abuse. (Yeah, I have stories and PTSD…)
And we didn’t need to be in the office(s) since the team was scattered around the nation. Still haven’t met 90% in person.
Technically I could have been telecommuting the last two decades, if it was offered. But back then, that choice was reserved for sales reps, executives, their pets, and side pieces.
Before that I had jobs that required hands-on testing semiconductors and telecom switches. Probably enough robots and automation to allow some remote work, but doubtful.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sam’s Club here is going to have a renovation soon. Originally we were hearing all kinds of new good stuff, like registers that took tap cards.
And then… I started to hear stuff like “only pay using Scan n Go app on your smartphone.” And the pizza making robot, and the other food robots, and basically automating everything at the Cafe until it’s a Horn and Hardart. And basically, staff getting cut dramatically, with workloads increasing a lot for the survivors.
So I might need a new job in the near future, which does not thrill me because apparently more than 50 percent of job listings are either lies meant to get personal information on resumes, or lies meant to cover up a lack of job search by a company.
LikeLiked by 1 person
OK, this calls for P.D.Q. Bach:
[Ducks and runs]
LikeLike
I hear the audience laughing, but with no video to show what they’re laughing at it’s pretty much 12 minutes of pointless.
LikeLike
I only do video between 2AM and 8AM. [Let me take a look. There are other versions around. And, the other one doesn’t have video, either.] This piece dates to 1965, and the hardart was custom made by Phillip Glass, who a) was a classmate & friend of Peter Schickely and is b)
notoriousfamous for works such as “Einstein on the Beach”.Some of Shickele’s PDQ Bach later stuff was videoed. Mixture of satire, slapstick humor, and amazing music. It takes a lot of talent to make the messes for P.D.Q. Back.
Same music, but with an introduction. I think this is from Schickele’s first album.
(I got into this rabbit hole courtesy of a seminarian who was renting a room from Mom for a while. He noted how deep the humor went; the more I learned about music theory (still not much), the funnier it got.)
The Wiki on “Concerto for Horn and Hardart” gets into more detail. Worth reading. (IMHO).
LikeLike
As one nephew (graduating college Mar ’25), and nephew-in-law (furloughed), are currently discovering. Bad enough after the ’02/’03 dot com bust. Horrible now.
LikeLike
I’m sorry. HUGS.
LikeLike
Thank you.
And yes, PDQ Bach, and kids’ books set in NYC, were how I heard about Horn and Hardart!
LikeLike
What I meant to say is that I need some job leads, and telework would be okay.
LikeLike
I got hit at the Y2K Dot com bubble burst, and sending out resumes got me some interviews, but no luck. What did work was a kind of word of mouth. The mandatory seminar to collect unemployment strongly implied that “knowing somebody who needed an employee” was the surest way to get a job. True for my case; especially since the other potential employers were either busy shoveling jobs to SE Asia or needed me to relocate with no expectation of security.
LikeLike
I got lucky in ’04. Not who I knew. But who my prospective boss knew of my former employers. Back to ’88 when he was renting space on one of the former boss’s client System32, then AS400, when originally writing the software system. I was no longer working for that company (they moved to Portland, bit a commute from Eugene).
LikeLike
What do you do?
Programming with supporting the software you are working on? Check out:
https://www.cascadegovsoftware.com/
No clue if hiring or not (lost my informers). Owned now by Black Mountain Software in Montana.
If you do get hired. There are (were?) a lot of documentation on the server “how to” for new hires programmers (long story). How out of date, given I’ve been retired now for 9 years? Guessing, not that much (I know how much the software tools changed in 12 years. Another 9? 🤷🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣Seriously🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣)
LikeLike
I suspect Musk’s attitude on telework might be informed by the Twitter purchase. Lots of work from home, emphasis on home and just cross out the work. It allowed him to downsize drastically and still improve the company. ‘Course he issued the same mandate for Tesla, so maybe he just hates teleworking.
The other issue I’ve seen referenced: .gov is still holding on to real estate for workers who don’t use it, costing silly billions. Use it or lose it, and telework could really push the lose it.
And if Joni Ernst has reliable info, some portion of remote workers are lying about work, lying about residence location for COLA fraud, etc.
Ending telework entirely probably isn’t necessary and may be a long-term negative, but short-term disruption and resorting may have significant offsetting value.
A number of companies have bounced back and forth on the issue, maybe the logistics and culture still need work.
LikeLike
Lose it works for me. I believe that you posit correctly that Musk has issues with telework. Very likely having to do with how many twits were phoning it in. OTOH if he had bought Google he would have seen all the Googs playing games and not working while at the office and he would have mandated telework. IMO
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’m all for lose it. Evaluating individual performance and dealing with termination procedures is complicated and time consuming.
Dumping (expensive) empty real estate… oughta be a no brainer.
LikeLike
Unless that real-estate is being leased from someone with what they think is clout. Then it might be harder, depending on the lease.
LikeLike
True. Billions in leases, maintenance & utilities… lotta palms sticking out. And surely no kick-backs. :|
LikeLike
How did you type that with a straight face? What’s your secret?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Easy. Just let the accumulated shock deaden your nerves.
LikeLike
He hasn’t been around for a while, but I remember. (And have missed him.)
LikeLike
Since it’s local (for now, both the design part in Palo Alto and the Fremont factory, emphasis on “for now” given teh states fatwa against all things Musk) I hear some things. Tesla is interesting. It’s not GM or Ford, in that instead of massive silos for manufacturability and engineering and dedicated campuses of artsy-yet-car-people designers scraping the clay (ok, mostly CAD now, but they still do clay), with long established “official channels” as the only way for those silos to communicate, at Tesla there’s a huge amount of “go talk to _ and figure something out”, or “go down to the line and find out if your idea will work”. That environment kind of demands they not be working from home.
But it’s also been managed pretty lean, given Musk’s Tech company background, and actively culled even when growing.
Twister was another story entirely. Even after I exited the Tech world I heard stories about how absolutely far away from “lean” Twister was, with similar stories for the other SF-centered Tech stuff. When Elon was going working to buy it, the abject panic among the folks there who knew with absolute certainty they were “fat” was epic. So when he walked in with the sink I knew the blood would flow from the Twister scuppers for weeks.
You are likely right that Musk has Twister in mind when he looks at .gov departments.
LikeLike
Your mention of silos reminded me of an interview I saw on Tesla’s process (Joe Justice on Pragmatic Talks). Stress on collaboration and rapid iterative development (thinking about SpaceX here…).
Your anecdote plugs in neatly, and yep, in person interaction seems essential.
LikeLiked by 1 person
OOOOH. You’re here. How are the doggies? Tell them I have chicken.
LikeLike
Bit of a lurker these days, sorry. Hiding from social media hell.
LikeLiked by 1 person
With tech workers, they can give others the space to work, if they have to go to the office. But, being surrounded by the extroverts drives them NUTS, particularly if there are mandatory meetings.
And, for situations like the Old Twitter, I have to believe it was a tech worker NIGHTMARE! Unable to goose step properly around Woke pronouns, ‘don’t even’ topics, and the ‘Woker-than-Woke’ team collaboration software, where people with too little to do competed to see how far they could go to SHOW those tech guys who runs things – I don’t doubt the company would have collapsed had Elon not taken over.
For those who want to point to the plummeting numbers of X users, and Bluesky’s rocketing user base, I have only one comment – Baloney!
They are largely bots that used to be on Twitter, and have now migrated to Bluesky. Not actual people at all.
LikeLike
I’m a hardcore introvert, and I hate going into the office to deal with in-person meetings. Because when somebody says something truly stupid–which is OFTEN where I work–I can’t roll my eyes, I have to look like a good little robot and can’t look at my phone during the boring parts or mute, turn around to my wife, and say “these people are idiots.”
I will collaborate when I need to. I don’t want to do it eight damn hours a day. Shut up, leave me alone, let me write and run my tests in peace, and if I have a question, I’ll chat you. Until then, I’ll be over here in my workcave alternately updating stuff in Jira and petting one of my cats.
LikeLike
yup. I’ve done some telework and if managed well it can work. I’m a believer in a hybrid where work that can be done remotely it should be done that way. If you have to “prove” you have read and understand some policy stuff do that on a remote connection. So firearm’s and use of force policy can be learned remotely and tested for. The actual weapon proficiency needs to be tested and done in person.
A lot of “paperwork” and administrative tasks are able to be done from anywhere and should be done that way. However there are those clowns that are scamming the system and make it a problem for everyone. Overall I think the federal employees are for most jobs are not needed. I don’t have a solution but pushing the government types to actually prove work being done is essential.
LikeLike
Miss Sarah, after about 40 years in IT, I agree in principle with most of your points; but working in office, even 50%, makes teams more productive. It also greatly reduces the chance of workers having multiple remote jobs at the same time.
I know of at least 5 people who worked with me at various companies who had multiple LinkedIn profiles, cellphones, and jobs simultaneously.
One is in prison now because he was also selling corporate data.
I get more exercise when I go to the office. I meet more people and get better at my job just by knowing people on our sister-teams.
I would love to give more details; but very few major corporations now allow 100% remote on higher income positions. They all have scars in tender places.
LikeLike
A counter example.
There is only one of my team that is local to me. The rest are scattered all over the US. It was this way before Covid when we would have to commute just to talk to people on the phone and chat.
And we are very paid well, everyone has at least 5 to 20+ years in our field(s), there are no absolute newbies or interns in these roles.
It would be difficult to skate or slack off since the systems are monitored and the work is engaging. Plus it’s easier to work more when needed since you don’t have to worry about a commute.
I get more exercise because I’m not sitting in a commute 3 hours a day. Also have more time to walk the dog, except the recent knee injury which would make a commute pure hell and turn me into a drug addict. Plus I can cook meals instead of eating junk.
I have been to the office 3 times since Covid started. They downsized on the building lease and are saving money by not forcing a return to office. Everyone is saving on gas, auto repairs, clothing, reducing stress and gaining 10 or more hours a week to use to live life.
If the office were a 10 minute drive in the high end suburbs like a previous job, I wouldn’t mind a commute. But it’s 90 minutes to a large urban shithole. Dog and human.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In My Not-so-very-humble opinion (IMNSVHO), this may be one of those (possibly rare) moments in which Musk is just wrong. I’ve observed an overall cultural trend toward dispersed systems and networks going back to the ’50s. As Charlie puts it, the low-cost provider wins out most of the time. When it’s cheaper to do work in a loosely-connected, ad-hoc-type organization (check the Japanese concept of <i>kiretsu</i>, for example.), it will eventually be done that way. Not certainly all at once, but … everntually.
I coined this phrase (at least, I think I did): cottage industrialists. Some time in the near future, we’ll look around and notice that — all of a sudden — lots and lots of work will be being done by cottage industrialists.
LikeLike
I think that was true, but now centralized control is being reasserted; the cloud is the clearest example of this. All information is actually stored and processed on a cloud server; the machine on your desk might as well be a dumb terminal.
LikeLike
Counterexample: https://tailscale.com/blog/new-internet
Talks extensively about how cloud led / is leading towards centralization, and how what they’re doing is helping put decentralized power back in users’ hands.
I’m not affiliated in any way with Tailscale, but I use their stuff. Their free tier gives you access to pretty much all the features, with generous limits (100 devices, 3 users). The 3-user limit is the only one that’s even remotely constraining: I have my wife and me on the account, but if I want to put my parents on the same account I’ll need them to share a login. And it’s been great: I no longer have to fuss with opening ports in firewalls, I can just say “send this file to my storage server” and it Just Works™ like it should.
LikeLike
Making it ever so much easier for Somebody Else to access and control your data. Or just cut off your account for whatever reason they find sufficient. Hey, if the bank can cut you off, the internet provider certainly can.
I keep my data right here, where I can see the physical device it’s stored on.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Absolutely 100%.
I had to force OneDrive off the new laptop we just got hubby. PIA. The only reason we have Google Drives currently is that is how we will have to switch phones (soonish). But only what we must. Pictures were manually backed up. Once we have the new phones, data on google drive will be deleted.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I avoid any cloud storage. Used to use strictly web-based email, but when my ISP went to a third party provider, I installed Mozilla’s Thunderbird, so my stuff is downloaded automagically.
I can’t imagine email on the flip-phone, and I don’t let the smart-phone connect to my email. The laptops* have login access, so when I travel, I can get mail on one or the other laptop.
((*)) One handles the ham radio setup, but is good for short trips, and is faster for setup. The other is better for watching DVD movies, but needs its own case.
LikeLike
The company I work for HAS to have its data on its own servers. Very simply, we have to process and create specific photos for our 150+ client schools (which means 200-2000 individuals per school) and get them exactly their photos, and with who-knows-which-person working on whichever-computer, we have to be able to LOCATE the data at any time. (Which then gets shared on a specific client location on a Google Drive, but it stays on our servers.)
I can’t imagine trying to track down something stored on One Drive. What a nightmare.
LikeLike
My Wife has worked from home since 2016.
When her coworkers were made to work from home in 2020, she’d start phone meetings with a five minute Ted Talk on the subject.
She’s frequently been recognized by management for her work quality. One size doesn’t fit all.
LikeLike
Two things about remote work.
One, office buildings in downtown Toronto are empty. After Covid, the genie is not going back in the bottle.
Two, -government- work that is remote, that’s different. Do I want the drone who’s looking over my government mandated forms doing it in Starbucks? No, I do not. I want, and expect, those forms to be held securely where nobody can get at them.
LikeLike
Given the … growing number of problems with the IRS since 2020 and work-at-home, I’m in favor of limiting work-at-home for a number of tasks. (Granted, how much of the IRS mess is people who are not-much-work from home, and how much is resources being directed away from revenue processing and collection I leave to others to sort out.)
LikeLiked by 2 people
There’s a simple solution for that — abolish the IRS! :-P
LikeLiked by 1 person
My ten-year-long experience with #LaMigra convinced me that government workers can be just as useless in the office as remotely. They simply did not process the forms. At all. One time they sent our sh1t to India. I am not making that up.
When your work authorization extends for 12 months, and you are not allowed to even apply for your next authorization until X months before expiration, but it takes them X+3 to 4 months to process your next authorization…
…and your lawyer, your employer, and your state senator (oh yeah, we called that guy, and he answered, and absolutely nothing came of it because they ignored him) cannot get anyone from #LaMigra on the phone, much less in person…
…I can’t imagine remote work has improved things for legal immigrants and H1B workers. At least with in-person they must be physically present at the government facility while they do nothing, instead of doing nothing in the comfort of home. If I have to suffer from them doing nothing, they should at least have to get out of bed in the morning.
To sum up, a doctor from Canada, educated AND LICENSED, AND LEGALLY WORKING ALREADY in the USA, and working in an official H1B-designated “under served area” into the bargain, can’t get their papers processed. Like, can’t. But Somali goat herders and Mexican grandmas can get a Green Card in St. Cloud Minnesota after crossing the border illegally. There’s an app you can get on your phone. No, again, I did not make that up. Apparently #BigFoodCompanyWithASwanOnTheirDeliveryTrucks has a deal with somebody. Not to put too fine a point on it or anything.
I pray to St. Elon of DOGE that the Holy Chainsaw of Righteousness finds good eating at #LaMigra. Clear-cut, burn and sow the ground with salt.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Remote work saved my career. After 22 years in law enforcement, where you really can’t telework (it was permissible if you were on medical and during COVID outbreaks but it was hit-or-miss), I developed medical problems such that I couldn’t be LE anymore. I was able to move into a regulatory job where they needed someone to cover the area I already lived in, so I was explicitly hired as a remote person. With medical appointments, it has been a blessing. I get more done – I’m not wandering around the office or out on the road where it’s basically impossible to track what I was doing. I have to respond to queries from all over the country, so I can “show my work” if anyone is concerned. If I have to cover all 50 states and the territories, does it matter where I *am*?
I think DOGE will snag a lot of low-hanging fruit, but I hope their attitude toward remote work is a little more flexible. I worked at an agency HQ for five years and I call tell you not one single thing I did needed to be done in Warshington. It could have been done in Des Moines or Walla Walla…
LikeLike
Taking it a step further, how many billions would the government save to let the office leases expire and just have a data center for the servers and computer equipment for the workers?
LikeLiked by 2 people
I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, in my role as a developer, there are fewer distractions, and I am more productive. On the other hand, in my roles as a technical lead and manager, being able to be there in person with my team would help with collaboration. Yes, the online meeting tools are OK, but a few minutes pointing at the screen or whiteboard get replaced by a half-hour long meeting, and I am never sure I am fully understood until later. On the gripping hand, my team is spread across four countries and three continents – return to office will not ease my collaboration since nearest team member is 1600 miles away.
LikeLike
Well, I’m convinced. Now to find a part time telework job. Any suggestions from the Huns?
LikeLike
There is a job search link on the hun’s discord….
LikeLike
Guess I need to join discord
LikeLike
Who I am: Software Engineer here – telework since 2020.. probably never going back into the office except for occasional visits. I failed to get hired at SpaceX due to a flawed standardized skills test. I really am one of the best in my field, and yeah I am bitter about that. On the other hand I probably would have worked myself into an early grave (in person) if I had gotten that job (and loved every minute of it).
I think what everyone here is saying pretty much covers the work from home thing. One thing missing that will gum up the works is the type of work that government workers do. Much of it is stupid, legislatively mandated manure, manufactured in Omnibus bills that the executive branch has little chance of correcting without facing legal jeopardy. I know, you are saying “But Mike – Biden got away with ignoring all sorts of laws”. Yes that is true, but these are mostly democrats we are talking about who have amply demonstrated they will attack in the courts when their particular oxen are being gored. In fact, I think I have read that they are lining up legal teams to do just that, even if Trump does nothing.
Elon’s particular approach may get quickly mired down in this morass. He can recommend this or that, but as long as such recommendations require legislative actions by a congress that has failed to do the right thing over and over again, necessary changes are going to have a hard time getting traction. That being said, if he focuses on pairing the cuts with regulation changes that ARE within the purview of the executive branch, there is a chance for success. This is especially possible in view of the Chevron decision. That particular axe is one that he can and should wield with wild abandon. Being a very smart man (with the obvious flaw of NOT hiring me), I’m sure he is already on to that.
LikeLike
Sarah, I like reading you, but I am afraid you are mixing two vastly different situations. I will leave these comments to the Department of Defense, but for the DoD the examples you provide rarely apply. First, the DoD is made up of contractors, civilians and military (who cannot tell-work for a variety of reasons. Although the huge percentages by department of teleworkers does not include the DoD there has still remained a significant number of DoD civilians who have or are still tell-working. The primary problem I see is that DoD work is primarily driven by collaboration of the kind that has not worked virtually. We don’t need you to get back to us with answers we need you to collaborate in an environment that enables shared understanding. This is fundamentally different than a programmer who develops a project on their own. During COVID productivity fell drastically and only picked up as we pulled people back in. Another problem with the “make work” argument is that many employees hide behind tele-work to appear busy and valuable. Having people in the office allows us to rapidly adjust to a changing threat environment, when they are at home they tend to be fire and forget, and by the time the system remembers (because it is busy elsewhere) they have created the perfect solution (maybe) to a question that no longer applies. I am all for tell-work in the right environment, but I have never seen a more productive government civilian who works from home. I am sure there are some, but from my experience that would be the exception not the rule. For those who want to tell-work, fantastic, the civilian world awaits. For those who want to serve in the government, come to the office and participate fully in the discourse that drives progress. My two cents.
LikeLike
This private sector contractor has spent 20+ years providing the military with skills in software development and testing that it apparently doesn’t have in house, or doesn’t want to waste scarce military / civilian capital on.
What was that line from Starship Troopers? “Civilians are like beans; you buy them as needed for jobs that only require skill and savvy.”
LikeLike
Having been a victim of the “collaboration” of DoD work, I’d very much like it to become telework, so I don’t sit in a holding pattern for six weeks while the school I’m supposed to go to sits empty, but the office has lots of chit-chat, and the fleet waits for the orders to be processed.
Most expensive janitors on earth, all because the glorified call center is a noisy, but collaboration heavy, mess.
LikeLike
WFH has been great for us. My wife works for a hospital in billing–fighting with insurance companies to get the hospital paid. Prior to the shutdown, she was driving a hundred miles a day. So fuel expenses and the wear on the vehicle. The surprising thing (to me) is that her entire department has migrated to working from home. It worked so well, the hospital kept it!
I’m not government, but sort of military adjacent. It doesn’t really lend itself to a work from home situation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Let me start off with my bona fides here: I spent fifteen years working as a civilian for the Navy in Crystal City, Virginia. I left the government in 1996, when they announced they were going to relocate the entire 3,500-strong organization to Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland.
At the time I left, FlexiTour (set your own hours within a broad set of guidelines) was well established, and I worked nine 9-hour days and got every other Friday off during each two-week pay period. FlexiPlace (which was what we then called “Work From Home”) was still in its infancy but clearly on the rise.
I doubt that either Trump or Musk (or Vivek) have any principled objection to WFH. Curtailing it for Federal workers is a means to an end, just like moving the workplace wholesale out of the National Capital Region.
WFH is a privilege, not a perk or an entitlement. And each individual agency–sometimes at a lower level than the agency, of course–determines its policy on such matters for itself, within the broader guidelines laid out by (I’m guessing) OPM.
Curtailing this privilege–I emphasize, again, exactly on all fours with agency relocation–is precisely intended to get people to quit, using means that are to hand and don’t require legislation or even regulatory revision.
So to compare it to individual WFH in the private sector is a categorical error.
LikeLike
Incorrect; it is part of the job negotiation as much as any other.
And in some industries it is a first pass check to see if the employer has any idea how their business works.
LikeLike
My job is not precisely piecework, but there is a task-management system that we use to help track how long each task actually takes. So while I am working from home, there is a concrete way to measure that I’m working at a reasonable pace.
Of course, my job (working for a photography studio) absolutely LOVES telework. Sure, the photographers need to be on site, and our back-of-house manager plus the occasional other worker with a bit of tech knowledge to be able to flip switches when necessary, but the ability to have people further than ten miles off clock in and do work without actually taking up space has been a boon. Plus the fact that they’ve been able to hire people like me, with occasional need to clock out and deal with a kid at school (or whatever—I have a dental appointment in the middle of the day, no problem), means they don’t have to seek out someone new with my particular skills since they know me and know I work well.
It’s not perfect for everybody. Our clients are primarily schools, which means it’s a boom and bust job, and “workshare” (partial unemployment for seasonal types) is a PITA to deal with. But since that leaves my summers free for Scouts, it’s perfect for me…
LikeLike
………………..
Isn’t that what vacation time is for? Or leave w/o pay? I was never forced into the latter, but that was the only way hubby and others could volunteer. Which is why hubby only did summer camp with Philmont. Scoutmaster went (twice) to National Jamboree. Summer camp was me and one other (teacher) parent, with a rotation of other parents during the week. Ten day PCT backpack was interesting. Only one summer where three of us (adults) started and ended the trip. Otherwise we worked the trek so adults could come in and others leave. Don’t know how other troops handle this, or how the troop handles it now. I know the old troop has grown so that they have to have multiple groups (max local wildernesses is 12, six in Hood wilderness). Plus the permitting system (just for a day hike) can be expensive for a group (VS free, had to have the permit, but filled and copy left at trailhead).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Most jobs don’t really allow for vacations anymore. You have vacation days that are really sick days or doctor days; and you never really can take off for more than a day at a time, because otherwise everyone else gets buried in work.
I haven’t taken an actual vacation day in… six years, maybe?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Son’s job is like that. Thanks to Oregon legislature.
Hubby’s job was never like that. But then his was union. They had to pick their weeks in September for the following year. Otherwise it was request leave without pay, and even if okayed, they could jerk it at the last minute (secret to preventing that was make them track you down). No taking the job with him either.
My jobs there was always a “How do we get a hold of you?” Weren’t happy when the answer was “You can try.” (Grin) “Here is the numbers where I will be: 1-800-Di/al-Pray, or 1-800-Di/al-Tree, or try 1-800-Noo-Cell and 1-800-NoP-ower.” 🤷Our own trips, or scout camp/backpack, even National Jamboree, didn’t matter. (Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill had coverage somewhat, but bit lacking in computers to be used.) And, yes, work tried. I always heard about it when I got back. 🤷
LikeLike
That is why the scouter camp burden falls on the few like B. Durbin, or like me, who either have the time off, can take vacation, or can take leave without pay. (To be clear, for me it is “had”. Retired from both work and scouting.)
My husband did ONE “week camp” (Philmont) in the 7 1/2 years son was at the scout level. I and the other parent did a minimum of two weeks / summer (14 for me).
FYI. B. Durbin has at least two kids in scouts in two different troops. She’d have to say how that impacts her camping. Even if both troops go to the same summer camp she can be the adult scouter for one troop that week (in general, there are ways around that).
LikeLike
Yes.
LikeLike
Well, it would be if I had a year-round job, but since my employment is “extra” money (oddly enough, mostly going towards Scouts), it’s fine to not have to fight about the timing.
My sons’ troop is skewing pretty young right now, what with the shutdown gap. They’re trying to work up a backpacking culture, but I don’t know if they’re the sort of troop that’s going to plan for Philmont. Right now they’re happy enough doing one summer camp out of state.
LikeLike
Very few troops in our council can take a contingent to Philmont. The council (was Oregon Trail, now Pacific Crest, with the merge with the Oregon portion of Crater Lake) always gets two contingents to Philmont for 8 youth (age 14 – 18), and 4 adults. That is how son and hubby went (son was age 14 + 10 days, youngest by 2 years. Dang kid went from being a picky eater, to a “see food” eater. Grew 3″ and gained weight. Everyone else lost weight.)
Wasn’t an option for me to go so hubby wouldn’t have to take leave without pay, I couldn’t pass the physical requirements (overweight for my height). Hubby qualified, but even he had to get special physician sign off because of the medications he was on, and age (same meds as what his is on now 16 years later, disadvantage of being an older father). Yes, the contingent need one of us to go for that 4th adult. Three of the adults who went were taking leave without pay from their jobs to go.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s a pretty cool office. If I had an office like that I almost wouldn’t mind the job that made me work in an office. But I have a question.
How the hell do you get in?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dope-on-a-rope? (Rappel down from above) :-D
LikeLike
Teleporting… :D
LikeLike
Seriously, the whole office bubble would reel up and down on those cables for access either at the top or bottom. Wind might be a problem; trying to work while your office is making like a pendulum does not sound conducive to productivity. :-P
LikeLiked by 1 person